Walking with Berger

Visual rhetoric helps us think through the ways that the images we see, things as minor as glances or as major as buildings, are involved in a communicative meaning-making process. This short video project allowed me to think about the ways in which gender functions as a lens through which I see the world. Thus, this video (both as a finished product and through the production process) provided a kind of visual/experiential education in the ways in which things such as architecture, fashion, and even facial expressions are all part of the rhetorical visual experience with which we constantly engage. Whereas many other models of literacy involve learning a theory and applying it in practice, creating this video and posting it online allowed me to participate in a form of multimedia literacy, one which allows us, as Elizabeth Daley explains, “to develop concepts and abstractions, comparisons and metaphors, while at the same time engaging our emotional and aesthetics sensibilities” (34).

While working on an independent study exploring visual rhetoric, Dr. Justin Hodgson and I wanted to think about one of the texts from our independent study, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. A project that already thinks through the ways in which visual arguments remain special, this piece provided a productive springboard for thinking through how online texts have taken ideas about appearance and gender in new directions. We started with quotes from the text that provided intellectual punctum, and from this starting point this project was produced: a representation of two people walking through Bloomington’s Center Square, with monologues representing the kinds of thoughts each one has walking through this space.​This short video project is a visual representation of John Berger’s notion that men and women pass through the world differently due to the different ways they are observed by others. Berger claims, “Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgment.” Thus, I wanted to capture the ways that women are constantly going through an evaluative process that men don’t always think about. While Berger’s filmic medium was cutting edge in the 1970s, updating the ideas necessitated using a current platform. Studying Berger’s project and then thinking through my choice of media allowed me to explore the differences between what Lev Manovich calls a “dynamic screen” and an “interactive screen.” He describes a “dynamic screen” as having changing images, like Berger’s original BBC broadcast. “Interactive screens,” on the other hand, can both represent and reflect reality, like my Vimeo project that showcases my ideas but also allows for immediate sharing and communication in the comments. Although Berger’s documentary and text allowed him to share his ideas with a wide audience, his medium lacked the interactive possibilities of an online video.

Making this video allowed me to see intersections between the kinds of conversations taking place online and the ones taking place in the classroom. While learning about Berger, I was also able to see the ways in which his ideas manifest in specific YouTube trends including “Get Ready with Me” videos, “What I Wore” videos, and even tutorials for makeup and hair styles. Online sites like YouTube and Vimeo allow not only for the sharing of work, but also interaction between the content producers and consumers that allows for a conversation to develop between the two, a model that parallels classroom conversation around a text, in which ideas are communicated and built upon by community members. In this way, the production process of the video as well as its placement online allowed me to experience the kind of posthuman practice that Casey Boyle describes as learning which “unfolds not through the traditional conception of rhetoric as critical reflection about an object but as an ongoing series of mediated encounters” (534). The encounters created through the filming process as well as in the online conversation generated about the piece facilitated a different learning model that made me aware of the places in the classroom, such as discussion, which at times defy instructor expectations yet produce learning nonetheless (often in unexpected ways).

The editing process for this piece required a filmmaking literacy that I had to learn through a practice-based education model. Because I’m visually and experientially oriented, as I suspect many of our students are, my learning style necessitates emersion as the most effective way to build new digital literacies. As such, Adobe Premiere Pro is a type of software that, for me, can best be learned through trial and error. Reading the manual or having someone else explain how to use the tools never quite allows for me to fully understand the software’s capabilities, and it’s only through immersion that literacy of the editing tools develops. Originally I wanted to edit the piece so that Dr. Hodgson and I walked parallel to each other, but because of differences in walking pace, Ryan Juszkiewicz and I worked to cut the footage and move the images of the two of us through the same locations one after the other, with occasional moments where we’re parallel. Thus, as my literacy developed, I was able to utilize the limits of the software and footage to execute an idea similar, but ultimately better, than my original one.

As I mention in the accompanying audio content, filming this project produced a visceral response from me as I was directly confronted with the kinds of comments and gazes that both Berger and Laura Mulvey explore. In particular, Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze was acutely felt both when I was being followed by the camera and as men observed the filming process. In this way, producing the video provided a kind of affective education, and enabled me to feel the theories of objectification Berger outlines. It also forced me to contend with a kind of “affective literacy” in a new way. As Jennifer Edbauer defines it, an affective literacy is “one that tunes into the lived dimensions of culture that do not surface or emerge in full representation” (152). In this case, the affective literacy I experienced was one that couldn’t be put into words, or even images, in Berger’s project. Rather, it was the very felt experience of the gaze that allowed me to understand the kind of communication possible through gazes and glances and ultimately facilitated a project in which I “write an intuition” (37) as Gregory Ulmer explains of the chorographic process available online. This affective literacy demonstrates one way in which the production of online texts makes them an important part of the educational process, one that cannot necessarily be accessed through the consumption of texts or ideas generated by others.​Creating this video helped me to explore the ways in which online and visual rhetorics can be used to expand the sorts of texts we analyze and find meaning in. The theories around voyeurism that Berger explored in the 1970s are experimented with in the platform this video utilizes. Vimeo allows for anyone to access the content, meaning that, like the paintings he talks about, this piece can be looked at by anyone, though the “anyone” has expanded tremendously since it no longer requires any level of physical presence (in a theater, gallery, or even seated in front of a television the way Berger’s original audience was). Sonja Foss’s second perspective-driven definition of visual rhetoric claims it as “a theoretical perspective that involves the analysis of the symbolic or communicative aspects of visual artifacts. It is a critical–analytical tool or a way of approaching and analyzing visual data that highlights the communicative dimensions of images or objects” (Foss 306). The production of this video allowed me to explore the meaning-making potential of everyday objects around me, and to build a type of literacy that allowed me to make something of these objects, spaces, and sensations to generate productive online conversations around them.